> If only 0.002% of the 700M+ iPhone users have a similar experience on a daily basis, collectively these notifications are causing over 8400 hours a year of pain to users.
This echoes the Saving Lives[1] anecdote:
> "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
The problem with such calculations is the assumption (often incorrect) that those little bits of "wasted" time would have been used for something more productive and are anything more than statistical noise.
While my home machine came out of hibernation yesterday evening I stroked the cat. I would have probably done that anyway while the authentication screen waited for me, had it started up faster.
While my work machine started up this morning I discussed the outcome of one of yesterday's problems with a colleague. This took several minutes so the PC starting in 20 seconds instead of 30 would have made no difference at all.
That's my reaction to that argument as well, whenever I hear it. "Over X amount of time you're saving X minutes/hours/whatever". It's nonsense, especially when we get into the seconds or microseconds, amounts of time hardly worth saving.
There are far more important reasons to not interrupt someone's workflow than "closing the notification takes precious seconds from my life". It's not the 2 seconds it takes to switch back to the other app, it's the 1 minute 45 seconds it takes to get my mind back to my original task or the 23 minutes that I'm distracted by whatever the attention-thief was.
Or worse yet, it's the lifetime and several hundred dollars when I become so frustrated that I switch to another phone. It's the $3 and hours of use that I've wasted when I switch to an app that doesn't demand push notifications.
Complaining about seconds wasted is ridiculous. If a second is "wasted", you're losing a lot more than just that one second. Don't make your argument based on the least impactful point.
This echoes the Saving Lives[1] anecdote:
> "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"